Emerald Fennell and the Hideous Allure of Saltburn

Don’t let the fancy mansion fool you. While Emerald Fennell’s aristocratic erotic thriller Saltburn has been compared to the standard novels of the English gentry – the homoeroticism of E.M. Forster, and Evelyn Waugh’s end-of-an-era mournfulness – darker-minded dramatists loom over their shoulders. The scathing sociological insights of Harold Pinter. The twisted psychosexual politics of Joe Orton. “It’s impossible for me to not acknowledge what comes before,” the writer/director noted, “to pretend that this exists in a vacuum.” Instead, she relishes playing with the audience’s metatextual acquaintance with her antecedents “as a way of making the game a little more complicated and surprising.”

Both playwrights’ stories often dealt with interlopers, “with these subversive, deep, sexual, masculine power[s],” said Fennell, an Oscar winner for her script for 2020’s Promising Young Woman. “That’s always something I’m fascinated by.”

It’s a fascination that is overt in Saltburn, the story of two Oxford students – poor orphan Oliver Quick (Barry Keoghan) and gilded aristocrat Felix Catton (Jacob Elordi). It’s a love story, but “not necessarily falling in love with a person,” Fennell said. “It’s falling in love with the person you might be, you might create of yourself. Because so much of it is the reflected glory of someone loving you back.”

When Felix opens the gates of Saltburn, the family estate, to Oliver, the question is whether it’s a spider inviting the fly into his web or the innocent bird hosting a cuckoo in its nest. Regarding that clash between depravity and naivete, Fennel mentioned Hilary Mantel’s historical novel Wolf Hall “and what she said about being in the court of the king being like playing with the lion. You’re tousling its hair, and all the time you’re thinking, ‘Those claws, those claws, those claws.'”

Like many such tales of the landed gentry, Saltburn is a period piece – although, unlike most, not set in the Edwardian or interwar eras, but in the mid-2000s. The timing, however, was not simply so Fennell could include a literally killer needle drop of Sophie Ellis-Bextor’s “Murder on the Dancefloor.” In those Gothic country house dramas, she said, “it’s always somebody looking at a time they couldn’t get over, so it has to be long enough for them to be obsessed, but not so long that it was practically difficult. So about 15 years felt about right.”

The timing also adds a certain awkward pleasure due to the mercurial vicissitudes of “the trend cycle,” she observed. Set any earlier, “it would have been Nineties, Y2K, which is already cool, and if it had been set now it would have felt like a Vogue photo shoot, something beautiful. But 15 years ago, no matter how sexy you were, a ‘Carpe Diem’ tattoo and a bad St. Tropez tan, it’s humanizing.”

However, whatever the period, Saltburn Manor itself represents a particular convention of the genre: the stately home that operates outside of time. It’s not so much a building as a system, above the petty concerns of those that connive and scheme within its oak-paneled and curtain-draped walls. “It’s a place where things are cleaned up without you even knowing,” she said, “where mirrors that are broken in the night are magically fixed. … A place where everything is seen but nothing is said.”

That’s why it’s vital to keep as close an eye on majordomo Duncan (Paul Rhys) as he does on his charge: not the entitled and ennobled Catton family, but Saltburn itself. Fennell recalled, “I said, ‘Duncan is the house,’ and he said, ‘Yes, I know what you mean.’ A lot of other actors were like, ‘Oh, yes, metaphorically,’ but I would always go, ‘No, no, no, Duncan is the house. He’s the embodiment of it,’ [and] Paul was the only person who profoundly understood what I meant.”

However, don’t ask her where the real Saltburn is, because she’s not telling. All she gives away is that it’s somewhere that has never been seen onscreen before. “It needed to feel like a discovery,” and that was challenging “because one of our most successful exports has been the British country house in our media, so we’re very, very familiar with them. So it was about finding somewhere deeply special that felt like a secret place.”

The fictional Saltburn itself is laid bare during that all-important needle drop. The song accompanies the film’s denouement, an epic tracking shot built around an extraordinary and daring moment for Keoghan, who Fennell described as “a perfect Pinter or Orton performer. … When it comes to things that may feel to other actors difficult or transgressive or exposing, he has none of that. He’s incredibly comfortable and confident in his body, so as an actor watching him is thrilling.”

There’s a constant line of questioning with Fennell’s work of how she “gets” actors to perform certain scenes. “There’s a hint of coercion,” she observed, but that couldn’t be further from the truth. “Because of the nature of things that I make and the scripts, what you find is that people are either all in or not for them. And what I end up with is people who are, from the beginning, all in.”

“The point of the movie is not to look away,” she concluded, “We’re inviting people to feel something that may be complicated, and to do that all of you have to be committed right from the beginning.”

Saltburn will be released in theatres on Nov. 17 by Amazon MGM Studios Distribution.

Saltburn

A Conversation With Emerald Fennell
Thu., Oct 26, 2:45pm, 800 Congress

Austin Film Festival runs Oct. 26-Nov. 3. Badges available now at austinfilmfestival.com.
Find more news, reviews, and interviews at Austinchronicle.com/AFF.

This article appears in October 27 • 2023.